THE PLAY OF MEANING(S): READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM, DIALOGICS, AND STRUCTURALISM, INCLUDING DECONSTRUCTION 何佩鈺 9753038 人社101

READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM (2) Another kind of reader-oriented criticism is reception theory. Such criticism depends heavily on reviews in newspapers, magazines, and journals and on personal letters for evidence of public reception.

One of the most important recent types promulgated by Hans Robert Jauss. Jauss seeks to bring about a compromise between that interpretation which ignores history and that which ignores the text in favor of social theories. Eg: Pope’ poetry , Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

Huckleberry Finn became the target of harsh and misguided criticism on the grounds that it contained racial slurs in the form of epithets like “nigger” and demeaning portraits of Negroes. In like manner, feminists have resented what they considered male-chauvinist philosophy and attitudes in Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.”

Plato and Aristotle, for example, attributed strong psychological influence to literature. Plato saw this influence as essentially baneful: literature aroused people’s emotions, especially those that ought to be stringently controlled. Aristotle argues that literature exerted a good psychological influence.

One of the world’s preeminent depth psychological, Sigmund Freud, has had an incalculable influence on literary analysis with his theories about the unconscious and about the importance of sex in explaining much human behavior. More recent psychological critics have focused on the unconscious of readers.

Norman Holland, one such critic, argues that all people inherit from their mother an identity theme or fixed understanding of the kind of person they are. Holland ‘s theory ,for all of its emphasis on readers and their psychology does not deny or destroy the independence of the text.

David Bleich, in Subjective Criticism, denies that the text exists independent of readers. Bleich accepts the arguments of such contemporary philosophers of science as Thomas S. Kuhn who deny that objective facts exist. Bleich claims that individuals everywhere classify things into there essential groups: objects, symbols, and people.

The last of the theorists to be treated in this discussion is Stanley Fish, who calls his technique of interpretation affective stylistics. Fish rebels against the so-called rigidity and dogmatism of the New Critics and especially against the tenet that a poem is a single ,static object, a whole that has to be understood in its entirety as once.

Later, in Is There a Text in This Class Later, in Is There a Text in This Class?, Fish modified the method described above by attributing more initiative to the reader and less control by the text in the interpretive act.

One is the effect of the literary work on the reader, hence the moral-philosophical- psychological-rhetorical emphases in reader- response analysis. The second feature is the relegation of the text to secondary importance, the reader is of primary importance. Interpretation becomes the key to meaning –as it always is –but without the ultimate authority of the text or the author. The important element in reader-response criticism is the reader, and the effect of the text on the reader.

Reader-response critics analyze the effect of the text on the reader, the analysis often resembles formalist criticism or rhetorical criticism or psychological criticism. The major distinction is the emphasis on the reader’s response in the analysis.

Reader-response theory is likely to strike many people as both esoteric and too subjective. Reader-response criticism has been a corrective to literary dogmatism and a reminder of the richness, complexity, and diversity of viable literary interpretations, and it seems safe to predict that readers will never again be completely ignored in arriving at verbal meaning.